Situating Protests in Southern Africa

Abstract

Protests involve actions of discontentment and lacking faith in an establishment. During a protest, more than one person can demand a change in the status quo. People engage in various activities, such as strikes, riots, rebellions, and civil disobedience, because they lack, among other things, a democratic space, representation and transparency, food or facing an increased aggravation of human rights by the state, captured government institutions, and dwindling economies. In Southern Africa, the study argues that protests have increased due to the wave of the democratization process that has brought populist political activism. A qualitative method using secondary sources explored a select of widespread protests in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Eswatini between 2006 and 2022. Marxism, Liberalism, and Constructivism were used to describe and analyze protests theoretically. The study finds that protests and populism have a coconstitutive nature and can be divided into left-populist and antigovernment and right-populist and nationalistic. The twenty-first-century responses shown by the examined states lacked flexibility, consensus, and emancipatory factors; it has been all about violence which is not different from general responses of the same states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.